At $20, new Lottery tickets a lot of scratch

Wednesday

Sep 26, 2007 at 12:01 AMSep 26, 2007 at 8:03 PM

If the lottery is “a dream for a dollar,” then what’s a $20 scratch ticket? Is it 20 dreams? Is it one really big dream. Or is it just saving you the trouble of scratching 20 tickets of the $1 variety?

Marc Munroe Dion

If the lottery is “a dream for a dollar,” then what’s a $20 scratch ticket?
Is it 20 dreams? Is it one really big dream. Or is it just saving you the trouble of scratching 20 tickets of the $1 variety?

Whatever it is, it came to Massachusetts Tuesday in the form of the Massachusetts State Lottery’s new “Billion Dollar Blockbuster” ticket, which costs a hitherto unimaginable $20 a ticket.

Players will win more than $1 billion in prizes, including 10 instant winners of $10,000,000. The Billion Dollar Blockbuster top prize is $1 million a year for life, and the game offers 140 million additional prizes of $1 million to $109 million. The game also offers 40,000 prizes from $1,000 to $25,000, and there are 6 million winning tickets from $40 to $500.

At Guimond’s, Andrade was not at all surprised that the new tickets were going in bunches.

“Not really,” she said. “A lot of customers are like that. They like to play.”
Play they did, and in multiples.

“I sold 10 to one person,” Andrade said. “I’ve probably sold another 10 sporadically and I’ve only been here an hour.”

While figures for the first day’s sales won’t be available until sometime today, Lottery spokesman Dan Rosenfeld said the stories he was hearing were encouraging.
“Anecdotally, it’s going very well,” he said. “There’s a lot of excitement.”

Rosenfeld said the $20 game was largely in response to customer demand.

“The players were asking for bigger tickets,” Rosenfeld said.

“The minimum winner on this ticket is $20,” he continued. “We sold a $200 winner today out of our own machine.”

If $20 for a scratch ticket seems like a lot to you, Rosenfeld notes that Massachusetts is behind, not ahead of, the curve.

“Every other New England state already had a $20 ticket,” he said. “Connecticut has a $30 ticket, which is kind of a strange amount, and Texas has a $50 ticket.”

Back at Guimond Farms, Andrade said the new game was paying off for some players.

“There are winners,” she said. “We sold one $200 winner and two $100 winners.”